Medical humanities as an aspiration looks both forward and backward, seeking in part the rediscovery of a certain attitude towards medicine, its natural objects/subjects (patients) and its place in the cultural, artistic and scientific order. That attitude is embodied in the idea of a Renaissance Man or Woman embracing an interdisciplinary (even omnidisciplinary) view of the world, a universal gaze which is, on the face of it, no longer available to us in a world of run-away specialisation in knowledge. Consider how one might both celebrate “the beauty of the human form and the nobility of the human spirit” and pursue “an insatiable curiosity for the materiality of the here and now, a Faustian itch to explore . . .”¹—a universal gaze which, fused …